Watts Up With That?

BUMPED for visibility. Originally published on 6/24. Bumped on 6/28 and again on 6/30

This poll will gauge reader perception to the issue that Dr. Hansen of NASA has recently raised that I cover in my post here. One vote per computer, and please spread this permalink to the poll far and wide to get a good mix of input across the blogosphere.

Click on a dot, then click the little yellow vote icon. Poll closed.

I will run this poll 1 week until next Wednesday at 9AM PST, at which time it will close. The results will be submitted to a member of the U.S. Senate for distribution, NASA’s director, and will also be mailed to Dr. Hansen at NASA GISS.

You can subscribe to the results of this poll by RSS. Simply copy the link below into your RSS reader.

http://polldaddy.com/pollRSS.aspx?id=49940E93EC30ACAF

NOTE: A couple of Pro-Hansen sites have staged a “crash party” for this poll. This has accounted for a huge increase in the votes for the first question overnight. This sometimes happens with online polls when agenda driven activists decide to skew it, which is the biggest weakness of online polls.

Addendum: Some other sites that are not Pro Hansen have also now linked to this poll, so I suppose it is becoming a battle between opposing views now. Agenda driven activists on both sides are at work now. 

Update 7/1 It appears that about 8000 votes were added for question 1 overnight. -Anthony

Update 7/2 9 AM PST Poll is closed, more here

A new paper published by the Astronomical Society of Australia titled:

Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle?

contains a warning about earthly climate change not immediately obvious from the abstract:

Recently I had some of my readers comment that they thought that The Weather Channel and USA Today (which uses TWC graphics) temperature maps seemed to look “hotter”. They suspected that the colors had changed. I tend to watch such things since my own company (IntelliWeather) produces similar maps.

I searched Google images for some saved older TWC maps, but found none. So I can’t be absolutely sure they have or have not changed.  But looking at the color scheme, nothing sticks out in my recollection of the temperature map colors.

But I decided that it would be an interesting exercise to compare USA national temperature maps from the commonly used services today. I saved national CURRENT temperature isotherms/gradient maps from around 03Z (11PM Eastern Time) tonight. All were generated within about an hour of each other.

What I found was surprising. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Intellicast: (probably the ugliest national temp map I’ve ever seen)

IntelliWeather:

Read the rest of this entry »

This thread debates the Miskolczi semi-transparent atmosphere model. 

The link with the easiest introduction to the subject is http://hps.elte.hu/zagoni/Proofs_of_the_Miskolczi_theory.htm

For some time I’ve been critical (and will likely remain so) of the data preparation techniques associated with NASA GISS global temperature data set. The adjustments, the errors, the train wreck FORTRAN code used to collate it, and the interpolation of data in the polar regions where no weather stations exists, have given me such lack of confidence in the data, that I’ve begun to treat it as an outlier. 

Lucia however makes a compelling argument for not discarding it as such, but to treat it as part of a group data set. She also makes some compelling logical tests that give an insight into the entire collection of datasets. As a result, I’m going to temper my view of the GISS data a bit and look at how it may be useful in the comparisons she makes.

Here is her analysis:

a guest post by Lucia Liljegren

Trends for the Global Means Surface temperature for five groups (GISS, HadCrut, NOAA/NCDC, UAH/MSU and RSS.) were calculated from Jan 2001-May 2008 using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) using the method in Lee & Lund. to compute error bars, and Cochrane-Orcutt and compared to the IPCC AR4’s projected central tendency of 2C/century for the trend during the first few decades of this century.

The following results for mean trends and 95% confidence intervals were obtained:

1. Ordinary Least Squares average of data sets: The temperature trend is -0.7 C/century ± 2.3C/century. This is inconsistent IPCC AR4 projection of 2C/century to a confidence of 95% and is considered falsified based on this specific test.
2. Cochrane Orcutt, average of data sets: The temperature trend is -1.4 C/century ± 2.0 C/century. This is inconsistent with the IPCC AR4 projection of 2 C/century to a confidence of 95% and is considered falsified based on this specific test for an AR(1) process.
3. OLS, individual data sets: All except GISS Land/Ocean result in negative trends. The maximum and minimum trends reported were 0.007 C/century and -1.28 C/century for GISS Land/Ocean and UAH MSU respectively. Based on this test, The IPCC AR4 2C/century projection is rejected to a confidence of 95% when compared to HadCrut, NOAA and RSS MSU data. It is not rejected based on comparison to GISS and UAH MSU.
4. Cochrane-Orcutt, individual data sets: All individual data sets result in negative trends. The IPCC AR4 2C/century is falsified by each set individually.
5. The null hypothesis of 0C/century cannot yet be excluded based on data collected since 2001. This, does not mean warming has stopped. It only means that the uncertainty in the trend is too large to exclude 0C/century based on data since 2001. Bar and Whiskers charts showing the range of trend falling inside the ±95% uncertainty intervals using selected start dates are discussed in Trends in Global Mean Surface Temperature: Bars and Whiskers Through May.

The OLS trends for the mean, and C-O trends for individual groups are compared to data in the figure immediately below:

Click for larger.
Figure 1: The IPCC projected trend is illustrated in brown. The Cochrane – Orcutt trend for the average of all five data sets is illustrated in orange; ±95% confidence intervals illustrated in hazy orange. The OLS trend for the average of all five data sets is illustrated in lavender, with ±95% uncertainty bounds in hazy lavender. Individual data sets were fit using Cochrane-Orcutt, and shown.

Discussion of Figure 1 Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an interesting note from grrlscientist at scienceblogs:

“In response to what appears to be a growing problem, a group of people at the Institute of Medical Science at University of Toronto in Canada wrote a scientist’s version of the Hippocratic oath. This oath (below) was recited by all graduate students in the biological sciences at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year. “

I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.

Given the politicization of science, such as we’ve witnessed recently from Jim Hansen’s conduct in calling for trials, perhaps making this a requirement for all graduating science majors, plus a requirement for membership to professional organizations such as AMS, AAAS, etc might be a good idea.

A guest post by Basil Copeland

Lucia, at rankexploits.com, has been musing over Tilo Reber’s posting of a graph showing flat 11 year trends in the HadCRUT land-ocean global temperature anomaly and the two MSU satellite data sets, UAH and RSS.  In answer to the question whether global warming is on an 11 year hiatus, “not quite,” says Lucia.  She challenges Tilo’s omission of the GISS data set, because notwithstanding questions about the reliability of GISS, it still shows a positive trend over the 11 year period in question.  Unless all the measures show a flat trend, Lucia’s not ready to conclude that global warming has been on an 11 year hiatus.

I understand the desire to look at as many metrics as possible in trying to divine what is going on with globally averaged temperature.  I also understand the reasons for questioning the reliability of GISS.  What I don’t understand is why the only measure of trend that seems to count is a trend derived from linear regression.  William Briggs recently had an interesting post to his blog on the relationship between trends in CO2 and temperature in which he introduced the use of loess lines to track trends that are not represented well by linear regression.  Loess refers to a type of locally weighted regression that in effect fits a piecewise linear or quadratic trend through the data, showing how the trend is changing over time.  Especially in an environment where the charge of cherry-picking the data — choosing starting and ending points to produce a particular result – is routinely made, loess lines are a relatively robust alternative to simple trend lines from linear regression.

 
Click for a larger image

Figure 1 fits a loess line through the data for GISS using the same 11 year period used by Tilo Reber (except that I’ve normalized all anomalies in this discussion relative to their 11 year mean to facilitate comparison to a common baseline). The red line is the GISS anomaly for this period, about its mean, and the blue line is the loess line.  While it varies up and down over the period in question, I would argue that the overall trend is essentially flat, or even slightly negative: the value of line at the end of the period is slightly lower than at the beginning of the period.  What this loess line shows is that a linear regression trend is not a particularly good way to represent the actual trend in the data.  Without actually fitting a linear trend line, we can reasonably guess that it will trend upwards, because of the way the loess line is lower in the first half of the period in question, and higher in the second half.  Linear regression will fit a positive, but misleading, slope through the data, implying that at the end of the period the GISS is on an upward trend when in fact the trend peaked around 2006 and has since declined.

Click for a larger image

Figure 2 is rainbow of colors comparing all four of the metrics we tend to follow here on WUWT.  Not surprisingly, the loess lines of HadCRUT, UAH and RSS all track closely together, while GISS is the odd duck of the lot.  So what does this kaleidoscope of colors tell us about whether global warming is has gone on an 11 year hiatus?  I think it tells us rather more than even Tilo was claiming.  All of the loess lines show a net decline in the trend over the 11 year period in question. It is relatively minor in the case of GISS, but rather pronounced in the case of the other three.  Of the other three, the median anomaly at the beginning of the period, as represented by the loess lines, was 0.125; at the end of the period, the median anomaly had dropped to -0.071, for a total decline of 0.196, or almost 0.2C.

Global warming on hiatus?  It looks to me like more evidence of global cooling.  Will it continue?  Neither linear regression nor loess lines can answer that question.  But the loess lines certainly warn us to be cautious in naively extrapolating historical trends derived by simple linear regression. 

Not even GISS can support the conclusion from the last 11 years of data that global warming continues to march upward in unrelenting fashion. 

A guest post by Mike Smith, CCM and AMS Fellow.

The Midwest floods were rolling downstream last week, setting river stage records in Iowa, bursting levees on the Mississippi, and causing thousands to be displayed from their homes.  Billions have been lost in damaged and destroyed property and 24 lives lost.

In the midst of this tragedy, the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) tried to capitalize on heightened public interest with an attempt to gain headlines by tying these tragic events to “global warming.”

The EDF proclaimed:  Did Humans Cause the Midwest Flooding?  In the piece, EDF’s James Wang writes, “Another element [of the Midwest floods] may be global warming, which increases the probability of extreme weather events like torrential rain.”  NCDC, a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, headlined, Extreme Weather to Become More Common.  The respective headlines can be found at http://environmentaldefenseblogs.org/climate411/ and www.noaa.gov/ .

This is fear mongering, not the advancement of science.  And, it detracts from NOAA as a whole because its National Weather Service performed heroically – with its field staff working long hours coping with the floods and accompanying tornadoes and severe thunderstorms.

It is unseemly to work to score public relations points when people are losing their homes, their crops, and their lives.

And, it leaves us to ponder a key question:  Does the science justify tying the Midwest floods to Global Warming? My answer?  An emphatic “no.” Read the rest of this entry »

A few days ago I posted a story highlighting the drop in water vapor in the atmosphere which initially looked like the entire atmosphere due to a labeling issue by ESRL, but turned out to be only at the 300 millibar height and not up to 300mb as the ESRL graph was labeled.

Even so, that brought a lot of people into looking at and analyzing the issue further. Barry Hearn of the website junkscience.com brought to my attention a review of the various atmospheric levels contained in the ERSL database. I had planned to do this myself, but I’ve been traveling this week and didn’t have as much time as I normally would, so  I’m pleased to present Barry’s writeup here for further consideration.

For some background into atmospheric absorption efficiency of common gases compared to the  electromagnetic spectrum, this graph is valuable:

Note the CO2 peak at 15 microns is the only significant one, as the 2.7 and 4.3 micron CO2 peaks have little energy to absorb in that portion of the spectrum.  But the H2O (water vapor) has many peaks from .8 to 8 microns, two that are fairly broad,  and H2O begins absorbing almost continuously from 10 microns on up, making it overwhelmingly the major “greenhouse gas”.

Click for a larger image

JunkScience.com
June, 2008

As followers of the enhanced greenhouse controversy are no doubt aware carbon dioxide cannot, unaided, drive catastrophic global warming — it simply lacks the physical properties.

In order to generate interesting outcomes climate modelers include impressive positive feedback from increasing atmospheric water vapor (marvelous magical multipliers, as we call them). By trivial warming of the atmosphere increased CO is supposed to facilitate an increase in the atmosphere’s capacity for the one truly significant greenhouse gas, water vapor, which then further heats the atmosphere, facilitating more water vapor and so on.

So, the obvious question is, is the atmosphere getting “wetter” and, if so, where?

Fortunately ESRL provides time series for various layers of the atmosphere:

Note that all graphics are confusingly labeled “up to 300mb only” but this refers to their maximum availability and not the current representation. Water vapor is given as specific, not relative humidity (grams water per kilogram of air) and is thus temperature independent for our purposes.

Firstly, there has been a moistening trend in the 1000mb (up to about 500 feet) layer.

Click for a larger image

Read the rest of this entry »

From the Anchorage Daily News, a view into what the weather is like this spring at 61.22N -149.85W

Days turn the corner toward darkness

After solstice today, it’s all downhill to winter
By BETH BRAGG
bbragg@adn.com

(06/20/08 00:39:20)

At 3:59 this afternoon, the sun will reach its northernmost point above the celestial equator and we’ll mark the official summer solstice. Many calendars note the solstice by calling it the first day of summer, but Alaskans know better. Today at 3:59 p.m., Alaska will make a U-turn and head straight toward winter as days start getting shorter.

Which is a shame, seeing how summer so far has been MIA.

We are deep in June and, as of Thursday, the temperature has yet to hit 70 degrees at the National Weather Service’s observation point near the airport, where daily highs and lows are recorded.

It hit 67 on Tuesday near the airport, the highest official reading in Anchorage since the year began.

We haven’t had to wait this long for a 70-degree day since 1993, when the mercury hit the 70s for the first time on June 19th.

Welcome to a record-breaker. Rah.

Could be worse, of course. Could be snowing. That happened in 1998, when solstice revelers spending the night atop Flattop celebrated in a freak snowstorm at 3,500 feet.

Snow or no snow, summer has been slow to arrive in Anchorage.

Beth Schlabaugh, president of the Alaska Master Gardeners Association’s Anchorage chapter, said lots of green things are off kilter because of summer’s delay.

“Definitely we’re seeing a much later season this year,” she said. “Everyone has talked to me about things being two to three weeks behind schedule.”

Roses have been late to break dormancy, she said. Irises and lilacs are only now showing up, and not everywhere. Seeds are slow to germinate.

“Just in my garden, the hostas are slow to come out of the ground,” Schlabaugh said. “Things are really late.”

On the upside, early bloomers like tulips are lasting longer, she said. And if you haven’t limed or thatched your lawn yet, the cool weather means you can do it now even at this late date and still reap the benefits.

The cool weather will be a blessing to runners who will spend Saturday morning running 26.2 miles in the Mayor’s Midnight Sun Marathon.

“Probably the best weather is somewhere between 40 and 60 degrees,” said Will Kimball, a two-time winner of the marathon. “You want cool.”

Kimball is calling this “the summer of the cold breeze.”

“Often it looks pleasant,” he said, “but that breeze has got a cold nip to it.”

Some people think the cool is, well, cool.

“I love this weather,” said Sam Albanese, a forecaster with the National Weather Service in Anchorage. “I’ve been up here 22 years now and as far as I’m concerned, 65 and cloudy is ideal. Seventy degrees and sunshine, and I feel like I’m down in Georgia.”

Albanese offers no promises for those aching for hot, sunny weather. It seemed like summer Tuesday and Wednesday — days that brought sunshine and warmth — but today and tomorrow should be cooler and maybe a bit cloudy.

The forecast for the weekend says it might hit 70 on Sunday — two days after the solstice, and two days closer to winter.